The Choices Behind WaNa

• A way of working that doesn’t overstrain either of us

• To follow a personally meaningful sense of necessity

• Feelings that shift with timing and circumstance

• Openness to involvement with others

At WaNa shop, we approach making, planning, photographing, and selling our work through choices we make on our own terms.
We value taking the time to talk through what we’re feeling as we go, so the work never becomes something unsustainable.

Whatever you do, it's a series of choices.
At the core of WaNa’s choices is what we call a “sense of personal necessity”—something that feels essential not in a universal or objective sense, but one grounded in our own intuition and experience.

Even if it’s not easily explained to others, we try to respect decisions that feel right to the person making them.
At the same time, when a direction seems disconnected from that inner sense, we return to the foundation and reassess.
Examining what standards of “good” are unconsciously influencing us—and where they come from—is a process we find both revealing and interesting.

This year, we moved our base of activity to a house in Yamanashi that has belonged to Watanabe’s family since the time of his great-great-grandparents.
The home carries traces of a life layered over generations—things added over time, signs of care and use.

It’s also a house that serves many purposes: a place where siblings return with their children, where family gatherings and memorials are held.
Because of that, there are constraints we can’t simply override with our own preferences.
But those very limitations have offered us new paths that feel distinctly our own.